Today, information processing apparatuses, such as a computer, are used. The examples of the information processing apparatuses include an information processing apparatus capable of enhancing the function by adding a peripheral device. For example, the operation of a peripheral device is controlled by a computation unit configured to perform arithmetic processing. A peripheral device may be added to the inside or outside of an information processing apparatus. For example, a peripheral device may be attached to or detached from a predetermined interface (may be referred to as an expansion slot) provided in an information processing apparatus. The examples of the interface include PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect), PCI-X, and PCIe (PCI Express, registered trademark).
For the information processing apparatus, a method for supporting the maintenance of peripheral devices has been contemplated. For example, there is a proposal that when an I/O card expansion device, on which a plurality of I/O (Input/Output) cards may be mounted, is connected to a computer and used, a light source at a slot position of a failed I/O card inside the I/O card expansion device is caused to emit light and thereby notify a maintenance personnel of the slot position.
Note that, in order to manage the connection of a plurality of printed circuit boards inside a computer, there is also a proposal that each printed circuit board sequentially transmits the information about a mounting position to a printed circuit board at a higher-level connection position and the information about the mounting positions of the plurality of printed circuit boards is obtained from a printed circuit board at the highest-level connection position.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2011-253332
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-110461
A plurality of devices (e.g., computation units) using peripheral devices may be provided in one information processing apparatus. In this case, a plurality of groups of a computation unit and a peripheral device used by the computation unit may be realized inside one information processing apparatus. Moreover, a combination of a computation unit and a peripheral device may be changed as needed. Such an information processing apparatus has a problem that when a failure occurs in a peripheral device, it is not easy to recognize the mounting position of the peripheral device inside the information processing apparatus.
For example, preferably, a maintenance personnel may easily recognize the position of a peripheral device in which a failure has occurred. Then, desirably, a log output by a device that uses a peripheral device may include the positional information about the peripheral device. Therefore, for example, a correspondence relation between identification information and mounting position of a peripheral device may be registered in advance into an information processing apparatus by hard coding, and used to provide the position information.
However, the identification information assigned to a peripheral device may change in accordance with a combination of the peripheral device and a device that uses the same. For example, in PCI, the identification information of even the same peripheral device may be changed by an operating system or the like operating on a higher-level device if the higher-level device, to which the same peripheral device is connected, is changed. Therefore, identification information initially assigned to a peripheral device may differ at another time point. That is, even if a correspondence relation between the identification information and positional information of the peripheral device is registered in advance, the correspondence relation is not always satisfied.